 Good day mate, 40 here. Looking back to Manly. Getting ready to take the Manly ferry over to Circular Quay and Sydney Opera House. Just watching, listening, reading, sub-stack here by Richard Ananya. Man needs sex and violence, not top-down meaning. Elites are miserable, normies are fine, and the 1990s are a respite from intellectuals. Yeah, pretty good sub-stack post here from Richard Ananya. So, as an example of intellectual hysteria, this is Athenian stranger talking to Alex Gashuta. But that's the point is that this goes back a long way. There have been a number of separate Foundings of America. There wasn't just one set of Foundings. There was the initial Founding, then there were Re-Foundings. Certainly. Wow, so just as individuals, we make up our lives constantly, we make over our lives constantly. Like today is the first day of the rest of our lives. So too with countries and communities and religions, who would have thought? Certainly LBJ with his new society was a Re-Founding. Certainly FDR with his new deal was a Re-Founding. And I get into this sort of... I've had to learn from some of my friends about this. I was very emphatic that Obama was another Founding, basically a fourth Founding of the country. But some of my friends made a very persuasive case that was really George W. Bush, I think. And it turns out he wasn't the nice guy that he thinks he was. And I think there's a lot of truth to that because he did some really insane things. But I don't know, I mean, sort of like... Yeah, just unnecessary invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan costing us $7 trillion and costing Iraqis hundreds of thousands of lives. But aside from that, real nice guy. It's really hard to say. I guess you sort of have to take the two of them together because they destroyed the country. They destroyed the country so thoroughly to the point where we're sort of living in Barack Obama's fourth term. Now I'm sort of rambling. That's all good. It's expected on the podcast. They do seem now just obviously... Yeah, can these long-form outright podcasts really save civilization? Obviously in hindsight to be very much creatures of the same era. They're almost, maybe it's history becoming a bit blurry in hindsight, but it's just they seem like they could be best buddies looking back from our vantage point at the moment. And I think the point you make is extremely good about the Founding. Essentially the Founding is just the solidification of ideas that disappear and are taken as common knowledge or as common sense, once they are absorbed into the body politic and into people's minds. And I feel like that's, you know, I think an extra debt JCB accredited for this. Politics is just religion that people actually believe in. And it is. I mean, that's... Guess what? Everyone has a hero system. And there may well be political elements to their hero system and religious elements and cultural elements and psychological elements and status elements and elements from the economy. We all have a hero system. And we're not even usually sure where we got it from. We don't even see it. We just take it for granted. But now you've got a hero system whenever you hold something to be sacred. Whenever you can't laugh about something. So I get upset when it comes to high rates of crime, the devastation of terrorism brought by Black Lives Matter. I regard human life as sacred and I list my objectivity and my coolness when it comes to massive increases in violence that brought about by activist groups in the cooperation of our elites, whether they're in government or in media, academia, NGOs, right? We trashed our police forces. We incentivized our police forces to stop enforcing the law. And as a result, we got a massive increase in driver deaths, pedestrian deaths, massive increase in crimes of violence, murder. All sorts of higher crime rates resorting to deaths of thousands of extra Americans, right? That I don't treat lightly. I'm unable to see the humor in that, right? Since the summer of George Floyd, we've had massively increasing crime rates and didn't really see the humor. So that massive increase in crime, that violates my hero system. That's the caliber of these ideas. Assumptions about equality, assumptions about race relations, female and male. Very fundamental day-to-day things have been completely amended where ideas that your grandmother held were essentially tied to Hitler. Yeah, and what people are incapable of deciding these things for themselves. People don't have agency. People just evolve to be gullible. You just really want to promote the zombie-bite theory of information that if some crazy blue-haired left-wing, an activist public school teacher tells your kid something that they'll just automatically believe it and act it out of the rest of their lives. And if they watch Netflix, then Netflix will start programming their brain. And your kid just has no alternative but to accept what Netflix says or those powerful, cutting-edge Netflix ideas are just going to take over his brain. So he's then helpless. Just saying that is just like, oh, it's a crime-stop, wrong thing. Hitler, your grandma was Hitler. Don't think about it. Everything that started from the new founding onwards, that's the only thing that matters. Yeah, and people can't do anything about that. They have no choice. They're just gullible. They're just going to buy any old nonsense that someone in power tells them. If someone weighs a dollar in their face or someone in authority, someone in elite status instructs them or if there's a message being viewed in a TV show or a movie, then they can't help but obey that message, really. That's not how I see humanity. The profound adoption of all this stuff is quite shocking, and I don't think it would have happened without the wonderful world of media. Yeah, for sure. I mean, there's no doubt about that. Oh, that is this brilliant fellow, Athenian stranger, right? Reactionary classicism here on Algae Specialties podcast. He says, oh yeah, for sure. Absolutely no doubt about what you're just saying. Absolutely no doubt that the zombie bite theory of information is true. Let's go! That's a pretty healthy lifestyle. All those people in the canoes, they look like they're over 50, and they're out canoeing a manly beach. That'll keep you fit. Yeah, but then people go to church, they have a hero system. Whether or not people consider themselves religious, they have a hero system. Whether or not people read the Bible, they have a hero system. Whether or not people read the New York Times, they have a hero system. A hero system is a biological necessity. It's some transcendent source of meaning. We usually take it unthinkingly from our community. And unless we're one of those exceptional characters who's creating exceptional art that we may have reason to believe will last down through eternity, we get our sense of eternity. We get our sense of transcendence from being part of a community that we believe is going to outlast us. It is going to go down in history and is awesome. And that plays a special role in the universe. That's where we get our ability to stave off insignificance through subscribing to a hero system. And so I'm in Australia. I'm in an Australian hero system and we have Australia Day coming up on January 26th. We're going to celebrate Australia, mate. Religion, right? They say things, at least in America. You'll have Christians saying, well, you know, I don't need a church to mediate between me and God. I'm just eating and everything to sort of change the meaning of what religion is because... All right, we've got the first secular societies in history in Europe. Protestant societies tend to secularize quicker because Protestantism is a religion of the heart, of faith, and that's easier to go away than the more total religions of Catholicism and Judaism. So, Protestantism is a religion of faith and theology and belief and ascent and something, you know, internal. Catholicism and Judaism are much more things that you do. It's a community, it's a way of life, it's much more total. And so it's a lot harder for Catholic societies to secularize compared to Protestant societies, but still even in Protestant secular societies, right? Protestantism has overwhelmingly gone away. People still have a hero system, right? People still believe they are part of something that transcends them and will outlast them and will go on down through history. For all practical intents and purposes, they're no longer believers in the same way that even their own parents were. And so what happens when you have circumstances in which most people don't think of science and at least it was? Yeah, so more and more of life is explained by natural causes, by science. More and more life is, you know, rendered efficient by neoliberalism. So life is increasingly rubbed of the magical and the enchanted and yet we still cling to a hero system that cannot be taken away because it's a biological necessity to believe that you're part of something that will transcend you and go on. What is so powerful until Dr. Fauci came along? Dr. Fauci simply articulated the mainstream position in science in the areas he was talking about, 95% of the time. 95% of the time he was simply aligned with what at the time was the mainstream perspective in science. Yeah, it's called a hero system and everyone has one. The immediate candidate to fill in is your community. We get our cues from our community. We get our hero system from our community. There'll probably be a political element, but we get our hero system is just handed down to us by the world around us. The community around us gives us meaning. It tells us what is marriage, is the military a heterosexual institution. And hero system is usually just something we imbibe without consciously choosing it. But we're usually lucky enough to belong to a community or a nation that we are reasonably will go on past the end of our lives. And so we connect to that community that goes down in history and therefore we are heroic because we are part of a community that does heroic things. Hey, it's the American century, yet again. And I'm part of the American century. Australia is the greatest country in the world, mate. I'm part of Australia. Jews, we're guys chosen people, I'm part of the Jews. Any two effects change in the world? Yeah, this guy would benefit from reading Ernest Becker, The Fear of Death. Learn about hero systems. Much more precise way of speaking. There's nothing insane about virtue signaling. Signaling is important. Animals signal, right? Animals signal that they're dangerous. They hop up and down to show how much energy they've got. They puff themselves out. They display themselves to attract a mate. Signaling is in here a part of being alive. Animals do it, human beings do it. Why would we not signal that we're virtuous people? That we're not good people. Virtue signaling is virtuous. Virtue signaling is a good thing. It means that you signal to other people that you're a good, decent bloke. This unthought through, warmed over caricature of an outright perspective is really pathetic. You'd think this guy would come up with a new idea. He's been rambling here for well over an hour with Alex Cachuda and has yet to say anything sharp or smart or new or unexpected. We put things on Twitter, on social media or on display as we go about to signal that who we are, who we affiliate with. You may wear a shirt to show which soccer club we support. You may wear a yarmulke to signal that we're Orthodox Jew and we fear God. You put a mask in your social media profile to signal that you follow public health advice and that you're taking a deadly pandemic seriously and you are not going to trivially pass on a deadly disease that is responsible for the deaths of innocent people. That sounds to me like a virtuous signal to signal about. What kind of person has a problem with someone who is signaling that they take human life seriously and that they again take the recommended steps to minimize the transmittal of a deadly disease? Yeah, you're signaling something. Animal signal, people signal. People don't want to signal that they care about the lives of other people. I'm a good person, that's what I'm doing. This guy is so shallow, he just takes it for granted that someone who is signaling that they want to be a good person, that they want to be virtuous, that they want to follow public health advice, that that person is a loser and shallow and unthought through and really the guy making the critique is the shallow one. Animal signal, they're not in the realm of religion or faith. They're giving things signal, including human beings. It's not something that's limited to religious faith or religion. We call practical intensive purposes their religion. You know who's deluded here? It's you, the speaker. To think of a sacred or holy. What kind of person doesn't think that life is sacred and holy? When you put a mask on your social media profile, you are signaling that you take life seriously and that you're following public health advice and you do not want to easily or carelessly pass on a deadly disease. If masks are effective against COVID and we're mandated to say so on social media if we're going to opine on the issue, then if that's where the evidence is, then by wearing a mask you are reducing transmission of a deadly disease and playing your part in being a good person.